Media Studies

Hey, guys! It’s been awhile, and also the world is kind of a disaster right now! Hurray!

At any rate, I wanted to share this crazy thing I’ve been working on for like three months because, well, I had to abandon my craft blog for personal safety reasons and I haven’t had a presence in fandom communities since I quit Tumblr in like 2013. This is the place I have to share and given my favorite topic of exuberant essays I figured y’all wouldn’t mind.

Behold, my quilt of over-intensity! I made a Captain America one last year, and then a Winter Soldier one for a friend. Everyone had to know a FitzSimmons one was coming, right? There are a ton of pictures and info under the cut. Two things: please excuse the lighting and quality of these photos—I work a night shift and never see the sun; second, share these wherever you want, I only ask that you please credit me and/or link back to here.

Y’all know I’m a Marvel girl. The MCU has been one of the things that’s kept me going for at least five years now, and most assuredly for the past two. So it’s a bit disingenuous for me to talk about DC’s film universe because I know from the get-go I’ll just get labeled as some sort of shrill Marvel shill. But bear with me because, above all else, I just want to be told a good story. I’m the first to call out Marvel when I think they’ve failed (which they’ve done frequently and spectacularly lately) so keep that in mind when I say that DC done lost its fool mind.

I had the misfortune of having to go see both Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad for a podcast that I host with my friend Marc. You can’t talk about something if you haven’t seen it. Marc is much kinder to things than I am. I wanted to burn everything to the ground after enduring both movies. Neither has any depth, plot, or character development. They’re both desperate, slapdash propagations of highly lucrative intellectual property. They rely solely on the fact that everyone is desperate to love the films because they love the symbols in them. DC has always been King. Batman has always been #1. Everyone already adores Harley Quinn. But Marvel’s film success has DC desperate to get their shit in front of eyeballs because superheroes sell. They seem to have missed the crucial bit that good stories about superheroes are what sell. (The box office returns v. critical acclaim debate I save for another day.)

There are so many problems with the entire situation that I can’t even enumerate them all. I don’t know the ins and outs of DC, Warner Brothers, or comics culture the way others do and DC’s disasters have been endlessly dissected by others better than I could. So what I’m going to talk about is not the horrors DC puts out but what I want from Wonder Woman. Because, to my weird specialized heart, that movie has the potential to be better than Captain America: The First Avenger. (Y’all ever heard me go on about Cap1? There are usually overexcited tears involved.)

Tonight is the finale of this disaster of a season on Agents of SHIELD (and yes I’ll do a postmortem) but what I want to talk about right now is character integrity and the way both Agents of SHIELD and Person of Interest handled disappearances/returns of major characters. Agents of SHIELD‘s “4,722 Hours” was like the epitome of what not to do while Person of Interest‘s “6,741” was ideal.

The premises here are largely the same. A stolid lady is taken from her friends and allies and is presumed to be in grave peril. In both cases, said lady is tentatively engaged in an unconventional romance which enhances but in no way defines her character. Both Simmons and Shaw express to their respective lovers that they reciprocate their feelings just as they are separated. Person of Interest allows Shaw to retain her agency, inhabit her space, and reaffirm her character. Agents of SHIELD, by contrast, robs Simmons of her agency, papers over her character, and forces her to emotionally contort exclusively for the sake of manufactured romantic conflict. 1 More than that, AoS takes a fully-realized character who rejects traditional gender roles and defines her exclusively by her womanhood and normative expectation where PoI eschews normativity altogether.

I try not to read reviews etc. of Agents of SHIELD because I have a weirdly fragile headspace about it, but a few of the taglines for “The Singularity” I just had to click through. I’m so specifically and intensely into FitzSimmons that I was curious if other people felt like they worked as well as I claim they do. What I noticed was the general consensus that everyone feels like Fitz or Simmons is who is going to die by the end of the season. That’s also the feeling that I’m getting, but I feel like that literally every time anyone suggests a character is about to bite it. For me, it’s just that I’m most invested in them, I dread it, and it would hurt the most. But, more than that, it comes from long conditioning to television romance narratives .

(Editing to add: I’m not saying they will, as many discussions lead me to believe that if they killed off either the show would essentially commit suicide. But this is the reason we all feel like they’ll get offed. It’s a thing.)

Additional spoilers for a ton of things, including: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel the Series, Battlestar Galactica, and The X-Files.

It’s Tuesday again, and for the first time in a few years this is how I feel about there being a new episode of Agents of SHIELD tonight:

Agents of SHIELD has become the most uninteresting, flat portrayal of superpowers in the entire MCU. Even The Incredible Hulk, which is utterly terrible in every way, has more nuance about powers than this. Did I say this last week? Have I said this before a million times in a million places? It’s worth repeating ad nauseam. The main premise (and a lot of the charm) of Agents of SHIELD is that it was always an investigation of how non-powered people deal with a superpowered world. Even Skye’s development of powers in season 2 was about self-discovery and self-acceptance. The superpowers were not plot devices but expressions of character traits or handy practicalities. Now, each episode feels structured around how to best show off nifty tricks that have no bearing on character. They feel cheap, like I’ve been cheated out of emotionally resonant stories about characters I care about in favor of flashy explosions and bizarre turns. You can’t even call this tactic “deus ex machina” because every story is built around how best to exhibit the powers. They’ve become the point rather than the premise.

Coulson, May, and Mack are perfunctory set dressing. Bobbi and Hunter are actually gone. Fitz and Simmons chill in the background and mouth jargon without actually serving any purpose in the story. (This charge was lodged against them at the beginning of the series. Know when they started to be relevant? When it was obvious they were madly, stupidly, profoundly in love with each other and incapable of expressing it. That is an essay in and of itself, but mostly: way to nuke that one.) Skye, or as they insist on calling her, “Daisy” slashes through human and civil rights simply because she has the power, with Lincoln as her romantic-plot-tumor sidekick. The problem with this is that the narrative never questions her. She’s framed as in the right at all times. She’s good, pure, high-minded, authoritarian Daisy. Bow before her coolness and girl power. Don’t question her or you’re a misogynistic hater.

This show sucks. I’m sick of it. It’s seriously currently as bad as it was in 1×01-15. Oh yeah, I went there. It’s over-reached and made itself irrelevant. Even though supposedly there’s a global crisis, everyone is in peril, and all of humanity is about to be enslaved by an Inhuman parasite there are no stakes. None of it matters. For Agents of SHIELD to matter, the villains need to be personal. Arguably, an Inhuman parasite infecting Ward’s body is personal, but that’s not what I mean. The danger itself needs to be personal. The people potentially harmed by failure need to be the agents themselves. There is absolutely no way that the entire world will fall victim to Monster!Ward. You know the good guys win. They have to. This show cannot affect the universe status quo. When SHIELD fell, that became a personal story for the show’s main characters. Coulson’s alien writing and Skye’s superpowers were both personal stories that affected the entire team. Saving the world from an alien contagion is too much. Our contingent of SHIELD agents isn’t in direct, immediate danger so much as everyone is in danger and Daisy’s Secret Warriors have to stop it because they’re so wonderful. The thing that made it work is gone. Even the character details and small background quirks are missing.

Maybe they’re twiddling their thumbs waiting for Civil War the way they did for Winter Soldier. One can hope. But Winter Soldier had six post-movie episodes with which to tell a coherent narrative. Civil War will have three. Currently, the series is hit-or-miss with it’s greatness, but in the past four weeks I’ve felt either apathy or hatred for three out of four episodes. That’s a terrible record. Maybe I’ll change my tune tonight. Maybe they’ll blow me out of the water, bring back all the character dynamics and stories I love, and make me care again. But maybe not. Maybe I’ll just stay profoundly sad that the coolest, smartest, most fun little trope-destroying, transmedia experiment of a series has self-destructed and doesn’t even seem to know it.

Lately, I’ve been minding my own business reading totally unrelated articles about the entertainment industry and media criticism when bam! Slapped in the face with a backhanded insult aimed at Marvel Studios. “They’re all the same,” reviewers opine with a wink and a smile. “Nothing happens in them; they can’t damage their franchise!” critics gleefully deduce, seemingly not paying attention to the films at all.

Let’s just dispense with the idea that all Marvel Studios films are the same and that nothing happens in them. It’s precisely the opposite of the truth and is such a willful misreading it smacks of elitist snobbery.

There are some things I just can’t let go. Science and scientists in the MCU is definitely one of those things.

Science is a massive part of the MCU’s logistics so most of the stories involve good scientists battling bad ones. The more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that it was more like altruistic ones fighting mad ones. I already had a minor squee fest about this here. I decided to plot it all out. Possibly my favorite thing about visualizing this idea is that it makes clear that it’s impossible to be an Evil Scientist who is not also a Mad one in the MCU.

Parameters

Each character is graded on a scale of -2 to 2, with -2 being the baddest/maddest and 2 being the most heroic/altruistic. 0 is perfectly neutral on both scales. Here’s how I defined those categories:

Madness – Mad scientists use science to deliberately harm others, to gain power or financial advantage over others in a way that detrimentally monopolizes knowledge, experiment on themselves, or let their quest for knowledge devolve into monomania. Generally, consider whether the character is over-emotional or under-emotional and then how that causes them to use their scientific knowledge (see: this post.)

Goodness – The goodness metric takes into consideration whether characters intentionally and wantonly harm others, their underlying motivations, and how actively they engage in altruistic behavior. Additionally, “heroic” and “neutral” characters can slide on the scale depending on how closely they’re aligned with the protagonists.

Heroes/Neutrals/Villains – Heroes are main protagonists. Villains are main antagonists. Neutrals are characters who are unaligned or who switch from one to the other.

A few of these data points are fairly arbitrary. Helen Cho, for example, has about 30 seconds of screentime and no discernible character traits so I made all that up. The others I tried to hold up to the spectrum schemata as closely as possible. I was even diplomatic about it and made Simmons a little bit bad and Fitz a little bit mad! As for who is included and who isn’t, medical doctors I generally left off unless they had a research specialty or partook in experimental studies (Lincoln and Dr. Streiten don’t really, for example.) A few side characters are noted to have scientific training but don’t use it extensively for plot purposes (Bobbi, Callie from “SEEDS”). That said, if I’ve forgotten any scientists or you’d like to argue for someone’s inclusion feel free to let me know!

(The inherent sanity of the author of this post is not up for debate.)

I have a long-standing vendetta against romance. The majority of romances in visual-based media are absurd, offensive, unrealistic annoyances that utilize narrative shorthand in place of actual character development and thus never make sense as more than some kind of male fantasy sequence. Media is predominantly an extended make-believe of straight male wish fulfillment. As such, its rare that women are anything aside from hetero sex objects and queer romance is taboo or a punchline. Even romances that aren’t gross masculine indulgence are usually some tumorous plot point included to appease the “lady demographic.” The irony is inescapable: women are perceived as obsessed with romance, but most “romances” in mainstream media are included for male audiences.

Even when relationships are given space to develop, time to breathe, and are a reasonable progression for the characters involved, I still tend to feel generally indifferent towards them. Take, for example, Roslin and Adama on Battlestar Galactica. Their romantic arc is perfectly lovely. I don’t care about it at all. It takes some serious shit for me to fall for a relationship and after every foiled investment it gets that much harder to sway me.

Fitz and Simmons are my actual downfall. Not only are they positive representations of scientistswith no superpowers and some fascinating gender politics—the nuances of their relationship feel like they were calculated to eviscerate me. What I used to say was “I have issues and these two stick their fingers right into every single one of them and wiggle them around.” That’s still accurate. Frankly, this did not come out of my brain very well, so I’m sure I’ll return to the topic in the future.